Tag: business mentoring

If you’re not getting introduced to a lot of your best clients’ best friends and colleagues, it’s because your marketing story is not worth talking about. It’s not remarkable.Being remarkable means two things.One, it means it’s cool, it’s neat.Two, it means it’s worth making a remark about.

If you or your service is worth making a remark about you are 99% of the way there.

However, we’ve talked with countless Financial Advisors and for the most part, their stories are the basically the same. They mention how their firm is different, where they went to school, the degrees they’ve earned, how great their numbers are, their charitable work, their families.

There is nothing about their story that clients and prospects feel is remarkable.

As soon as an Advisor moves away from their old marketing story to a new client centric story, everything changes. They’re qualified activity goes way up. So does revenue.

Because when you have a great marketing story, not only will your clients respond to you, they will also talk about you and your service to their friends.

Developing an effective story is a detailed process that shows you understand your market and their predominant worldview… distrust of Advisors and the Industry. (See Darth Vader Post) So, any form of puffery or selling razzle-dazzle will literally or figuratively slam the door.

An effective marketing story reveals your true authenticity. If your story is not authentic (and you don’t live your story every day), your clients and prospects will not be fooled.

Done well, it’s what will make your clients dedicated advocates, trumpeters who want to tell the world about your service. In their eyes it’s remarkable and so are you.

So, think about it. Have you completed a lot of warm, personally introduced meetings and first appointments with quality friends and colleagues of your best clients?

All marketers tell stories. And if they do it right, we believe them. We believe that wine tastes better in a $20 glass than a $1 glass. We believe that an $80,000 Porsche is vastly superior to a $36,000 Volkswagen that’s virtually the same car. We believe that $225 sneakers make our feet feel better—and look cooler—than a $25 brand. And we believe it!

Today I’ll share a few quotes from Seth Godin’s book “All Marketers Are Liars”.

They will help you understand why you must reinforce what your target market already believes.

Godin writes that “worldview is the term I use to refer to the rules, values, beliefs and biases that an individual consumer brings to a situation. A worldview is not who you are. It’s what you believe. It’s your biases”.

Here are several thought-provoking quotes from Godin’s book:

This on why stories should agree with your customer’s worldview:

Great stories agree with our worldview. The best stories don’t teach people anything new. Instead, the best stories agree with what the audience already believes and makes the members of the audience feel smart and secure when reminded how right they were in the first place.

This on why you shouldn’t try to change someone’s worldview (even if the facts and data reveal they are wrong):

Don’t try to change someone’s worldview is the strategy most smart marketers follow. Don’t try to use facts to prove your case and to insist that people change their biases. You don’t have enough time and you don’t have enough money. Instead, identify a population with a certain worldview, frame your story in terms of the worldview and you win.

This, on preconceived worldviews:

Worldviews are the reason that two intelligent people can look at the same data and walk away with completely different conclusions—it’s not that they didn’t have access to the data or that they have poor reasoning skill, it’s simply that they had already put themselves into a particular worldview before you even asked the question.

Finally and most importantly:

Every consumer has a worldview that affects the product you want to sell. That worldview alters the way they interpret everything you say and do. Frame your story in terms of that worldview, and it will be heard.

“A company without a story is a company without a strategy”. **
Having a clear and distinctive story is critical in building your company’s brand.

However, there’s a difference between broadcasting your story–storytelling–and living your story, or storydoing.

Understanding the difference between the two and making that shift toward the latter is fundamental to building your business.***

From Storytelling to Storydoing
So, how do you effectively get the story of your brand and your service into the world?

Shift to storydoing.
It’s telling people what you do and then doing it. People talk about a service that is remarkable… a service that is worth remarking about.

90 percent of people trust a friend’s recommendation.
People are more influential than ever.
Those recommendations are based on great experiences.

The old adage continues to ring true: Actions speak louder than words.

What Makes a Great Storydoing Company

Storydoers are structured differently. They all put their story at the center of their Company and build it into their services and products.

They know what they are for and what they are against.

Great story-doing companies are on a quest. They define an ambition, beyond making money, that comes through in everything they do. Being the biggest or the most financially successful is not a quest. There has to be a fundamental generosity for a quest to inspire. It has to be something that inspires people to join and evangelize.

Zappos is on a quest to create an amazing customer experience regardless of cost. It makes that real in its culture, even offering money to customer service employees to leave after a couple of months if they don’t love their jobs.

The enemy is bad service … which brings us to the final story-doing attribute:

Great Storydoing Companies have a defined enemy.
JetBlue was created to fight against the bland and brutalist experience on the major national air carriers. Its stated quest was to “bring humanity back to airlines.” It didn’t do that through slogans asking you to “fly the friendly skies,” but rather expressed it through experience: one class of service. Leather seats for everyone. Satellite TV for everyone. Unlimited (and free) snacks for everyone.

In the networked world, shifting from storytelling to storydoing will make your business not only more efficient and effective but also fundamentally more rewarding–for your customers, your staff and your community… and for you.

(*edited Inc magazine article by Rosemarie Ryan)

(**Marc Andreessen, co-founder Netscape)

(***According to Brand Asset Valuator, overall scores of brand quality, brand loyalty, and brand trust are in decline, down 24 percent, 31 percent, and 50 percent, respectively. Perceived value is dropping as well.
Ask CEO’s whether their services or products are differentiated from the competition and 80 percent will say yes.
In stark contrast, just 10 percent of customer agree.)

“A Simple Blueprint For A Successful Brand.” **

Brand building is the deliberate effort to create the desired perception in someone else’s mind.

It’s been said that “A Brand is not just a logo, a website, or your business cards… It’s an experience.”

To build a great brand you need the right blueprint for shaping perceptions about your service or your product.

The best blueprint begins with just three components: what, how and feeling.

Consider the example of Southwest airlines. What service do they provide? Well, it’s pretty simple: they move you from here to there.

That is Southwest’s what.

The what of a brand is typically straightforward. The most successful brands tend to represent only one what in their customers’ minds.

After what comes how.

Understanding the how of a brand begins with seeing that for every product or service, there can be many ways of delivering the what. “Overnight,” “cheaper,” “organic” – these are the types of words used to signal the specific how for which a business wants their product or services to be known.
For the most part, hows tend to travel into twos. One how is not quite enough, but more than two is unnecessary.

For Southwest Airlines, the first how is: “by air.”

Southwest began flying its first passengers on short hauls to and from second-tier airports in Texas where the competition was more likely a Greyhound than another airline.

There is a deep branding lesson. The customer is trying to accomplish a specific result – a specific what. The hows compete with one another. Nothing else does.

Southwest has a second how: “at a low price.”

Take away either of Southwest’s two distinct hows, or their performance aspects, and the brand – that is our perception of Southwest – starts to fall apart. Only Southwest is offering the entire package at once- the what and how that differentiate their brand in the minds of the customers.

What and how are the fundamentals of a sound brand blueprint, but the most successful brands include a third component: feeling.

Customers want to do business with people they like. Who doesn’t? Similarly, we prefer to consume products and services we feel good about. Southwest customers like the Southwest brand. The brand is fun and laid-back; it makes people feel good.

So, to summarize: brand building is the deliberate effort to create the desired perception in the mind of another person. The blueprint for creating the perception has three basic elements: what, how, and feeling.

**Edited from a post on Forbes.com by Jerry McLaughlin
*Quote from Jeff Bezos

“THE ANSWER”.A constant stream of warm, quality 1st Appointments personally introduced to you and endorsed by the grateful, friendly, quality clients in your client book – for the remainder of your career.

We have interviewed countless numbers of Advisors over the years and not one Advisor gave us “the answer”.

Rare indeed is a market where everyone is active. Almost no one buys the bestselling book, almost no one watches the Tonight Show.

We think we’re designing and selling to everyone, but that doesn’t match reality. It makes no sense at all to alter your best work to appeal to the longtime bystander, because the bystander isn’t interested. And it certainly makes no sense to try to convert your biggest critics, because they’ve got a lot at stake in their role of being your critic.

Growth comes from person-to-person communication. And from activating people who are ready to be activated.

The most recent Presidential election makes this clear: It’s the non-voting bystanders who are in the majority:

Do you have a picture in your mind’s eye of what you want your business to look like? Do you imagine having more 1st appointments.? How about having consistent new warm qualified 1st appointments with the qualified friends and colleagues of your best clients? Does this sound like you?

Well, believe it or not, if you are an experienced Financial Advisor, no matter your income or that of your clients, you already have a business that is primed and ready to breakthrough with consistent new warm qualified activity…month after month, year after year.

You can make it happen, if you really want it. You can access the untapped opportunities that exist within your practice.

Some Advisors are able to do this and do it very well. And truth be told, their business is basically the same as yours. Like you, they have a bunch of clients they’d love to duplicate. Like you, they desire consistent new warm qualified 1st appointments. The only difference is that these Advisors have an innate ability to make this activity happen. You may not have this ability but it’s not necessarily catastrophic. Like many other things, it’s a business problem to be addressed and solved.

A great first step is finding and working with a mentor who can get you there. If you choose the right mentor, things should start to happen within 60 days and you’ll be on your way. If it doesn’t happen, find another mentor and give it another 60 days. And so on.

Walt Disney once said, “If you can dream it, you can do it.”

So take a look around. Do some research. Know that with the right guidance, you can make it happen.

Client Centric Marketing, a division of MB Marketing, Inc., teaches Advisors how to work with the qualified friends, family and colleagues of their most valuable clients, the clients they want to duplicate.